[Sussex] Cautionary notes - amavis & spamassassin

[Alan F]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 02:01:22PM +0000, Iain Stevenson wrote:
> 
> Having just been 'educated' by linux again, I thought I'd post a few notes 
> of caution on leading edge spam and virus scanning ...
> 
> I upgraded to SpamAssassin 3.0.1 and found my email system was broken. 
> Specific issues are:
> 
> - SpamAssassin can't distinguish between versions of Berkeley DB - so if, 
> like me you've a system with more than one version installed you're likely 
> to stuff the Bayes databases

Did you sa-learn --sync? I'm pretty sure I remember reading that
instruction in the release notes after I had the same problem...

> - Support for DCC and Pyzor is broken in SpamAssassin 3.0.1 - so do without 
> them or expect trouble

Indeed. Razor is still working (by far my highest scoring test),
though. DCC is pretty slow anyway and adds a lot to scanning time, so
I don't really miss it.

> - Amavisd-new 2 has some subtle differences in the way email forwarding and 
> quarantining are handled - it's not just a simple cut and paste job to 
> upgrade from earlier versions
> 

I don't really use this... Virii gets consigned to oblivion (accurate
enough for me to not care about quarantining it), and spam gets tagged
and dealt with by procmail.

The switch didn't go to bad for me, I waited until 3.0.1 instead of
diving into using 3.0.0. The URI blacklists are very cool (blocking
based on spamvertised URL's. I've noticed a marked difference in
performance also. Oh! And SPF support is nice to see...

Alan